USDA Web site lauded for data warehousing

The Agriculture Department's Lighthouse Project has won a first-place award for best practices in data warehousing from the Data Warehousing Institute of Seattle.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service site, at lighthouse.nrcs.usda.gov/lighthouse/index.html, offers one-stop shopping for geographical and agricultural data. It has a gateway for ordering data from the TerraServer database, either for download or shipment on CD-ROM.

Users can also access the Soil Data Viewer, which layers graphs of soil surveys over corresponding digital images from TerraServer [GCN, April 30, Page 38].

One of the Lighthouse Project's corporate partners, Environmental Systems Research Institute of Redlands, Calif., gave the Soil Data Viewer a second-place award in its 2001 Geography Network Challenge contest, NRCS information systems team leader David Anderson said.